Detailed item info | Synopsis | John Grisham returns to Ford County, Mississippi, the setting of his earlier thriller A TIME TO KILL, for another dark and suspenseful tale of Southern small-town secrets.
| | Size | | Length: | 245 pages | | Height: | 9.8 in. | | Width: | 6.5 in. | | Thickness: | 1.2 in. | | Weight: | 20.8 oz. |
| | Publisher's Note |
Ray Atlee is a professor of law at the University of Virginia. He's forty-three, newly single, and still enduring the aftershocks of a surprise divorce. He has a younger brother, Forrest, who redefines the notion of a family's black sheep.
And he has a father, a very sick old man who lives alone in the ancestral home in Clanton, Mississippi. He is known to all as Judge Atlee, a beloved and powerful official who has towered over local law and politics for forty years. No longer on the bench, the Judge has withdrawn to the Atlee mansion and become a recluse.
With the end in sight, Judge Atlee issues a summons for both sons to return home to Clanton, to discuss the details of his estate. It is typed by the Judge himself, on his handsome old stationery, and gives the date and time for Ray and Forrest to appear in his study.
Ray reluctantly heads south, to his hometown, to the place where he grew up, which he prefers now to avoid. But the family meeting does not take place. The Judge dies too soon, and in doing so leaves behind a shocking secret known only to Ray.
And perhaps someone else.
| | Industry reviews | "Grisham tells his tale in a bright, knowing style that owes something to country music. His evocation of small-town life in rural Mississippi can be deft, but the action that makes up the bulk of the book is disjointed and repetitive."
New York Times Book Review (02/24/2002)
"John Grisham is at his best when he's plotting heavily, tossing his characters into dire straits and then pulling out the stops to save them, all the while weaving in details of legal precedence, and playing with the gray area between the letter of the law and its spirit.... In THE SUMMONS, he returns in all his Grisham glory, complete with lawyers both good and bad, legal issues to be pondered and the delightful suspense that keep us flipping the pages."
Los Angeles Times - Bernadette Murphy (02/26/2002)
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